TV REVIEW : Cambodians in America Caught in Cultural Bind

The contemporary tragedy of Cambodia is no longer just measured in the countless numbers or cultural resources lost during the Khmer Rouge “Killing Fields” dictatorship of the 1970s, or in the thousands who fled to Thailand during the 1979 Vietnamese invasion, but also in a way that once again brings the Vietnam War back to America.

Claudia Levin and Lawrence Hott’s “Rebuilding the Temple: Cambodians in America” (at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28) pulls the curtain back to reveal a community of survivors of still-vivid brutality trying to balance old and new cultures.

The story is told in the best tradition of humanist documentary filmmaking, and, in some ways, it’s a traditional American saga of emigres making a new home. But Cambodian-American families are caught in a special, two-way bind more extreme than most immigrants. Because of the ancient stability of Cambodian Buddhism, any integration of religious customs into an incompatible American context is virtually impossible. And because of the highly structured Cambodian family life with parents at the helm, young Cambodian-Americans tuning in to pop culture and consumer society are on a collision course with parents holding onto traditional ways.

With families torn apart and a culture of renowned gentility nearly decimated by war, survivors in America have had to adapt to a way of life alien in almost every respect: Urban, materialistic, competitive and secular. Monks worshiping in an Amherst, Mass., apartment that also serves as a temple worry about having a temple in such an enclosed area. Temples are the backbone of Cambodian Buddhism, but the kind of grand temple of the old country, they explain, is too expensive to build here.

An orderly system appears to be slowly crumbling under the combined weights of circumstance, time and generational pull. Young Cambodian-American women no longer wish to be told who to marry, and as the camera shows a family arguing about this across the dinner table, the viewer sees a glimpse of the non-negotiability of open societies and ancient ways.

Rithipol Yem, whose impassioned poems punctuate this portrait of a sad yet amazingly thriving people, tells of how he aims for a “middle way” between both cultures. But the film raises real doubts if such a way is possible.